Given the implications of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) findings — government intervention, progressive social policies, more international aid — it’s perhaps not surprising that those who deny climate change is real or a problem pushed back. It took a few days, but the climate science deniers’ response to the IPCC report is now in full flow.

What we see is three distinct layers of climate science denial at play here:

There’s the ‘this isn’t happening’ sun-spot brigade. There’s the ‘this is happening but it’s all a Communist ruse’ zealots. And then there’s the team who reluctantly admit they’ve lost the debate but shoehorn in a number of caveats and excuses to justify why nothing should happen.

The scientists are clear: “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are needed if the humans are going to prevent the world warming by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

This news — emanating from the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) mammoth new special report — comes as a surprise to almost no-one. Least of all the fossil fuel industry, which has known for decades that the carbon budget that keeps that goal within reach has been rapidly depleting thanks to its products.

Warming is higher than the 1°C average over land, with temperatures as much as three times higher in the Arctic, causing melting. Extreme temperatures, rainfall, and sea levels have been pushed higher.

Massive and rapid transformations across societies will be needed to keep to a 1.5°C target, with dramatic cuts to fossil fuel use across all sectors of society.

Will 2018 be the year that mainstream media is not duped by professional spin doctors and fake experts paid to downplay and deny the realities of climate change?

Call me cynical, but after more than a decade of research and writing into the role big fossil fuel companies have played in sponsoring coordinated attacks on climate science with public relations spin, I remain unconvinced we won’t see a resurgence in climate denial.

Later this year, a major update on the state of climate change research — the impacts, solutions, scientific underpinnings, etc. — will be released by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

As 2017 came to a close, warnings of the catastrophic impact of climate change intensified. Devastating floods and hurricanes have highlighted the vulnerability of some communities around the world and the rise of carbon dioxide levels in the atmospheres shows efforts to tackle climate change urgently need to be ramped up.

In the UK, ongoing Brexit negotiations have brought no more certainty on the future of environmental regulation, while the government continues to support new and old fossil fuels industries.

We have permanently breached the symbolic 400 ppm threshold for the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere this week. Scientists believe we are now unlikely to live in a world with less CO2 than this, putting us on track for dangerous climate impacts.

And now, new analysis released today by seven leading climate scientists warns the world could be on course to warm by 2°C as soon as 2050.

Published by the Argentina-based NGO, Universal Ecological Fund, the report was authored by several scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including Dr Carlo Carraro, Dr Pablo Canziani, Dr Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Dr James J McCarthy, Dr Jose Goldemberg, along with Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Lilianna Hisas, executive director of Universal Ecological Fund.

The authors argue that the pledges made by the world’s nations in Paris last December are “inadequate” if we want to slow climate change.

Lord Lawson would command the admiration and gratitude of the sceptic cause when he raised the economics of climate change in the House of Lords. DeSmog UK’s epic history series continues.

Lord Nigel Lawson delivered the coup de grâce in June 2005 when he persuaded his fellow peers on the economic affairs committee of the House of Lords to examine the economics of climate change.

As a committee member, Lawson persuaded the House of Lords to launch a powerful and high profile Parliamentary inquiry examining allegations that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had based its analysis on poor statistics and economics.

A new paper published on June 4 says the much-discussed “slowdown” in warming at Earth's surface may not exist after all.

The study, published in the journal Science, says it is likely to be largely a figment of the way temperature records have been pieced together over time.

Scientists from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reanalysed temperature records and concluded that surface warming over the past 15 years is higher than reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body set up to assess global warming. Temperatures are rising at least as fast as they were in the second half of the 20th century, say the authors.

In this DeSmog UK epic history post we meet David Henderson, who accidentally became one of the IPCC’s fiercest opponents.

David Henderson is a fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) where he is valued as an eloquent and modest advocate of radical free market capitalism. But, his engagement with climate scepticism “came about in an entirely unplanned and fortuitous way.”

The former head of the economic division of the state-funded international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) was, in April 2003, spending his retirement busily devising a book which he planned to call False Consensus: Dark Visions and Collectivist Remedies.

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"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE